Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), a young punk rocker living in mid-1980s Los Angeles, is fired from his menial supermarket stock clerk job. At a party, he finds his girlfriend having sex with his best friend. He soon finds that his pot-smoking, ex-hippie parents have donated the money they promised him for finishing school to a televangelist, supposedly to supply Bibles to El Salvador. Depressed and broke, Otto falls in with Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a seasoned repossession agent, or “repo man”, working for the disingenuously named “Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation”, a small-time automobile repossession agency. While repelled by the concept at first, Otto’s opinion is rapidly changed when he is paid cash for his first “job”.

Otto soon learns that “the life of a repo man is always intense.” He enjoys the drug use, real-life car chases, the thrill of hotwiring cars and good pay. His old punk-rock lifestyle seems boring by comparison, and he begins to develop a rapport with his fellow repo men as well. When he returns to a punk club to see a lounge act (played by real-life hardcore punk band Circle Jerks), he is amazed at how terrible they now seem.

Soon, Bud, Otto and competing repo men all over town are searching for a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu from New Mexico; this vehicle, unknown to them, contains something mysterious and dangerously powerful in its trunk, also sought by a strange female CIA agent, Agent Rogersz (Susan Barnes), and her staff.